[[Danny, Quinn, Bob, Tim, Rael, Nat, Dan, Raffi and Nelson: I've cc'ed
you on this because I think you'll be interested -- see the bottom half
of the message for the background, which is a speech that Bruce Sterling
gave at the O'Reilly Open Source Con in which he rehashed some of an
ongoing debate we've been having about spam and the end-to-end
principle]]

--

So, Udhay asked me to respond to Bruce's talk. I'm not sure what to say.
I think the world of Bruce, and I have some deep disagreements with him.
He's wicked-smart, and that makes those disagreements all the more
enjoyable. He's challenged my thinking on this, but I'm still
unconvinced (though I've come around on some points).

It comes down to this -- to a certain extent, Bruce and I are both
techno-determinists, except that, IMO, I'm an optimitic determinist and
he's a pessimistic determinist.

I shared a room with Bob Frankston at a conference last spring and he
basically blew my mind. He did it with his "Connectivity" rant, which
you can find by googling "connectivity frankston" -- I won't try to sum
it up here because Connectivity can't be summed up; it can only be
grasped, as far as I can tell, through repeated exposure to Frankston at
close quarters.

It's about the end-to-end principle, and messaging protocols. In an
end-to-end, messaging world, my machine sends your machines suggestions,
without any intervention from any third party, provided that both
machines are on the Internet (or, tautologically, the way that you can
tell if a machine is "on the Internet" -- an ethereal concept at best --
is whether it can receive suggestions from any other machine "on the
Internet").

Two principles: any two parties can communicate, and what they pass to
one another are suggestions.

The koan that Frankston told me that led me to enlightenment was this:
"On the Internet, my right to swing my fist *doesn't* stop just short of
your nose, because it can only impact with your nose if you execute the
'punch yourself in the nose' suggestion. It's *your* responsibility to
figure out which suggestions you want to execute."

Or words to that effect.

When you see things this way, there is no malware, no spam.

Really. I mean, yes, in the real, present-day world, we don't get to
choose which suggestions we execute, but that's because we've got bad
software.

But the software is getting better. My second relevatory experience was
installing Mozilla 1.0 and finding the "block images from this server"
context menuitem. The lid lifted off of my head and my brains did a
traditional folk-dance in celebration of the extreme cleverness of the
Moz hacker hivemind.

Because here, at last, is a crude but amazingly effective way for me to
easily decide which suggestions I want to honor and which ones I want to
ignore. My pal Raffi at the MIT Media Lab has a sterling (heh) exemplar
of the power of suggestions versus orders. He's working on a project
that polls a bunch of news-sites, like cnn.com, every couple of minutes,
and times the latency of the response. The idea is that the next time a
crisis of 9-11 grade rolls around, these news-sites will experience a
massive DDoS attack from a half-billion panicked netizens and they will
go down like a preacher's daughter. The way it goes is, Raffi's
automated user-agent sends an HTTP request to cnn.com, and its httpd
believes that it is sending an html file to a browser, and accordingly,
it passes a file over the connection that contains a bunch of
suggestions as to what to do with that file. Raffi tosses all those
suggestions out, and times the response and decides, based on latency,
whether something critical is happening somewhere in the world. Because
CNN is passing Raffi a suggestion (and not an order!), Raffi can do
something totally unexpected with it -- Raffi's like a jazz-critic who
listens to the pauses as much as he listens to the notes.

Vipul's Razor hints at another universe of suggestion-management. I get
a metric fuckload of spam -- like, 400 pieces -- every day (I get 600
pieces of non-spam every day, too, which is why my time for
mailing-lists like this one is pretty limited). Spammers are total
shitbirds, sure. But I'm loathe to look to legal solutions for this sort
of thing. When we apply trespass doctrines -- the leading legal theory
for shutting down spammers -- to open services, the Internet basically
ceases to exist. Could the silklist exist if the list-manager needed to
hunt down the admin of every subscriber's mail-server and secure his/her
permission to send silklist messages? Hell, no.

It's like deep-linking. There's an excellent technical means for
stopping search-engines from spidering your site -- create a robots.txt
file at your docroot and biff-bam, you're dark-matter. If you don't want
to get linked to by offsite referers, you need only edit your apache
config, add a couple lines, and hey-presto, no one can visit your site
except through the paths you specify.

But deep-linking opponents don't want to use technical means to estop
links to their sites. Rather, they assert a moral right in copyright to
the public fact of the existence of their pages. They believe, IOW, that
if I want to state, on my web-page, that there is a page x at location
y, that the author of page x should be consulted in advance and his
permission secured. Could a search-engine exist in this universe? Hell,
no.

Would the Web work without search-engines? *Hell, no*.

So how do we address the flood -- the torrent, the deluge, the
avalanche -- of spam that threatens to drown out all civilized discourse
with MAKE PENIS FAST? With automated tools that let us manage whose
suggestions we want to honor. When I xmit this message, it will travel
from my computer to smtp.well.com and thence to lists.vipul.net.
Lists.vipul.net will relay that message to a couple hundred smtp servers
around the world, which will in turn deposit the messages in a bunch of
standards-defined and proprietary mailboxes -- POP, IMAP, webmail,
whatever. Then you folks will use a piece of client software to download
the message.

The message is, in itself, a suggestion: please display this message
inside of a mailer, with the following summary info (headers). There is
nothing present in this message that can possibly compel your
mail-client to display it. The decision to display the message takes
place entirely at the "edge" (though the Internet, IMO, doesn't have
edges -- this is a pernicious lie perpetrated by Hollyweirdniks who
think that the Internet is an *entertainment medium*, where the "center"
sends "content" to the "edge," so that the couch potatoes at the "edge"
can passively "consume" it; Gibson nailed the Hollywood conception of a
consumer in *Idoru*, a person "... best visualized as a vicious, lazy,
profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm
god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the
size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives
by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.
It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into
those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth..., no genitals, and
can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile
desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in
presidential elections.") (man, I get paranthetical after midnight) (to
continue this point about the Internet's shape, it's like a Klein
bottle -- the "edges" all touch each other, that's what end-to-end
means, and so there is no "last mile," only an infinitude of "first
miles").

Crap, where was I? Oh yah, mail is a suggestion.

Your mailer and your mailer alone is the point at which a
command-decision is made to show you a message. Vipul's Razor works on a
dead simple principle: ask motivated spam-haters (the people who are
currently reenacting Lord of the Flies in smtp blackholes and 1984 with
regexps in Spam Assassin) to manually tag those messages that are
unambiguously spam as spam, then publish cryptographic digests of the
found spam so that other people can gain access to them.

But Cory, I hear you say, wtf good does that do my sainted grandmother,
who wants only to see the webcam photos I sent her of my newest
offspring without wading through 700 Nigerian scam-letters and appeals
to send postcards to poor little Craig Shergold? If you emit the phrase
"cryptographic digest" within 300 yards of her perfect, wrinkled ears,
she will shreik in technophobic horror, assume a foetal position, and it
will take the technical wizardry of the finest doctors at Johns Hopkins
to revify her.

Or words to that effect.

There's a flip answer to this: Your grandmother will be dead soon.
Meanwhile, illiterate street-kids can figure out how to do really
amazing shit with a computer. Soon, those children will be adults, and
your grandmother will be dead. So the future of the Internet is in good
shape.

But screw the flip answer, because there's a better one: Give your
grandmother a mailer that interoperates with Vipul's Razor. One percent
of the Internet's users, if that, create web-pages with links in them.
Nevertheless, that one percent is more than sufficient to provide a
citation structure that Google can tease forth to organize the whole
goddamned Web with eerie accuracy. Hoo-ah!

Likewise, if one percent of the world's cranky, fixated,
high-functioning-autistic techno-elite can be coaxed into tagging all
the goddamned spam, in real-time, then there will be a kick-ass,
up-to-the-minute database that your grandmother's mailer can consult
*before* it shows her the messages it's fetched from the POPd. The
mailer takes anything with an x-vipul-spam: Yes header and sticks it in
a "Don't look at this unless you're a cranky, fixated, high-functioning
etc" folder, and it is invisible to your grandmother. When spam slips
through the filter, your grandmother *can* (but doesn't *have to*) use a
special "delete" shortcut that tags the message and sends it out to the
universe.

The Cloudmark people are doing good work on hardening the Razor. There's
a reputation metric that kills the ability of careless/malicious users
who submit non-spam as spam to actively participate. There are a bunch
of mailer plugins in the works. It won't be built overnight. Like Moz,
it'll probably take several years before we see a ready-for-grandma
release of Vipul's Razor, and it will probably have a cute,
grandma-friendly name like "Kali, the Destroyer, Devourer of Spammers'
Souls."

Or words to that effect.

Damn, it's getting late. Dammit Udhay, stop asking me interesting
questions at midnight!

More stuff:

Regexp hackers aren't the devil, neither is SpamAssassin. Danny and
Quinn have taught me this. SpamAssassin is basically a framework for
encompassing a variety of anti-spam approaches, and its genetic
algorithms mean that it will (if I'm right) eventually evolve away from
all the document-parsing/machine-intelligence approaches in favor of a
multiplicity of collaborative filters.

Razor isn't quite Google for spam. Google captures implicit, idle
decisions -- links -- and uses them to organize the online universe.
Razor asks its users to generate explicit decisions outside of their
normal course of business. This makes Razor a DMOZ for spam (at best) or
a Yahoo! for spam (at worst). If collaborative filtering approaches to
spam are going to work, they need to find ways to capture more implicit
decisions. Figuring out where those implicit decisions about spam can be
found is the most important technical challenge of the next 24 months.

Cloudmark has a partial solution. They ask ISPs to reactivate accounts
that have been dead for 12+ months and submit all the mail that reaches
them to the Razor. This is the kind of thing that I'm talking about, but
it's still a flawed approach, since it assumes that no legit list will
leave subscribers on its roll after one year's worth of bounce-messages.
This is an invalid assumption. Lots of legit lists do *not* prune dead
addresses from their rolls, which means that using reanimated zombie
accounts for Vipul-fodder will end up tagging legit mail-traffic as spam.

The winner will be the system that *never generates false positives*. It
is simply *not acceptable* for mail to vanish or bounce if it legit
communications. A system that advises you to ignore suggestions from
your trusted pals undermines the end-to-end principle.

A friend's workplace has a porn-filter in place that keeps mistaking my
short stories for pornography and bouncing them back to me. My friend
and his co-workers have started to hand out alternate email addresses to
people in the outside world, not because they want to receive porn at
work, but because they can't afford to have their conversations
disrupted by an imperious perl script (the phrase in my current novel
that keeps tripping SpamAssassin is "young Asian cop" -- "young Asian"
rings the cherries on SpamAssassin's pornfilter).

OK, I'm out of steam and now it's one in the morning. G'night.

--


Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2002 11:29:51 +0530
To: silklist@...
From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay@...>
Subject: [silk] Bruce Sterling's Open Source speech
Reply-To: silklist@...

I like this guy. He has a gift of taking the current
Lurking_Fears_In_The_Collective_Unconscious and using them to make his
points. Kind of like using the weapons of demagoguery against them. I
even
agree with him on most of this.

We are overdue for a revolution in terms of how we (for variable values
of
"we") interact with our technology providers. Our Governments. Our
customers. And yes, these are MORAL issues we are talking about here.
What
is happening now is definitely the "frog in a vat of boiling water"
thing.
We are all the frog. The temparature has risen gradually, and we didn't
notice. Now the temperature has become uncomfortably hot; AND the people
at
the stove have become so blatant that they have turned the flame up
full-force.

So, we die, or we revolt. Who cares if the oppressors (a term I do not
use
lightly) are revolted by this? That is not a rhetorical question. Who
cares? Enquiring minds want to know.

to quote Sterling on this:

When a
crackdown comes, that isn't the end of the story. That's
the *start* of a dissident's story. And this isn't about
fat-cat crooks in our Congress who are on the take from
the Mouse. This is about global civil society. It's
Globalution.

Udhay

PS: bonus points to the talk for mentioning *two* silklist members. :-)



"A Contrarian View of Open Source"

San Diego
July 26, 2002

Thanks for showing up to see the obligatory
novelist at this gig.

It's very touching of you to take the trouble to
watch me get some emotional issues off my chest.

You know, I don't write code. I don't think I'm
ever going to write any code. It just amazes me how
often people who know absolutely nothing about code
want to tell software people their business. "Why
don't they just," that's the standard phraseology.
"Why don't they just" code-up something-or-other.
Whenever I hear that, frankly, I just want to slap the
living shit out of those people.

That's like people whose fingers are covered with
diamonds complaining about the easy lives of
diamond miners.

You're, like, seven miles down in this diamond mine,
and these cats are laboring, laboring with these pickaxes
and blasting caps and giant grinding machines. And it's
like: "Why don't you people just put in a tomato garden
down here? Don't you like fresh air in this diamond mine?
How about some zinnias and daisies? You over there, with
the carpal tunnel wristbands == you sure look pale, fella!
Don't you like the sunshine?"

They don't like to confront the sweat, and the labor,
the human suffering.... Even people who are in the
industry don't like to talk about what a massive drag it
is, to sit there, grinding code, at 3 AM, as your eyes,
and your wrists, and your spine, all slowly give out.
Everybody has to come up with these farfetched, elegant,
literary metaphors to describe this process.

Stuff like "the Cathedral and the Bazaar." Now, I get
it about being the bazaar. I'm a science fiction writer,
I got no problem at all with bizarre stuff. But
commercial software? Microsoft? As a cathedral?

Have you ever seen a cathedral? Cathedrals are
medieval religious centers where people do penance and
take vows of poverty. They worship relics of the holy
dead in there. Microsoft is a commercial software
company. It's *the* commercial software company. It's
got to be about the least cathedral-like structure known
to humankind.

When you go into a cathedral, you don't read
shrinkwrap licenses. There are no developers' documents
in there. You've gotta read stuff like the Bible in a
cathedral.

And it's an interesting book, the Bible. Not one word
about software in it. It's got all these obscure parables
and weird war stories and such.

Like the story of Jesus Christ chasing the moneylenders
out of the temple. I know this is kinda hard for
contemporary people to get their heads around, but Jesus
Christ used to beat people up with a whip for being
capitalists. He chased the moneylenders out of the sacred
precincts. They were extremely alarmed by this. They
were screaming stuff, like "Hey wow! The Prince of Peace
is beating the living crap out of us!" He didn't even
claim that they were *crooked* moneylenders in the temple,
it's not like they were Enron or anything. It's just ==
the very idea that there should be any commercial activity
whatsoever in a cathedral == this was enough to make the
world's best known prophet and pacifist philosopher
completely blow his top.

This interesting divine perspective is kinda
overlooked in Eric Raymond's metaphorical treatments, I'm
noticing.

When you look at the way Open Source plays out in our
society, you get a rather traditional industrial dynamic,
very early-20th-century.

It's this classic artisans-versus-factory model. It's
not about a bazaar. Because bazaars are pre-industrial,
they're swarming with crooked rug merchants, and
pickpockets, and lepers straight out of the Arabian
Nights. Open Source isn't about being some kind of canny
rug merchant with an eye out to make some fast dough.
Open Source, basically, is about hanging out with the cool
guys.

It's very tribal, and it's very fraternal. It's all
about Eric, and Linus, and RMS, and Tim and Bruce and Tom
and Larry. These are guru charisma guys. They're like
artists, like guys running an art movement. Guys who
dress up with halos and wear wizard hats. That form of
organization is not a bazaar. It's not a cathedral. But
it nevertheless has some distinct advantages. Because if
you're in a cathedral then you have to wear this holy
uniform all the time. If you're in a bazaar you have to
stake out this patch of ground and keep it, and defend it,
or just get overwhelmed by other guys greedier than you.

The coolest thing about doing this artsy
noncommercial creative work is that you get to stop. You
get to throw up your hands and quit, if you want. It's
like a charity. The widows and orphans are telling you
"Thank you for not letting us starve, kind sir!" They're
all grateful to you, they're touching the hem of your
garment. You get to feel pretty good about what you're
doing, and if you're tired, you just stop. It's like:
"Okay, I'm tired! I've got compassion burnout now. No
more free software. Lady, you and your damn kids can
starve."

Nobody can do anything about that sudden refusal on
your part. "Well, he gave us a really cool algorithm....
What more can we possibly ask?" If you abandon your rug in
the bazaar, people just steal it immediately. They steal
everything in a hot second. But if you abandon your open
source code, the code just sort of sits there. Other
people pitch in, and it gets bigger and fatter. There are
big festering piles of code, huge piles of code. This has
been playing out for seventeen, eighteen years now.

A classic struggle in other ways. You've got the
Stallman free-as-in-freedom model... This guy sees code
as some kind of handmade luxury vehicle. Maybe it's a
tank. And you've got Gates, who is the commercial
industrialist robber baron. The Ford Model T... any
color you like as long as darkness is the standard.

If you're prettier then Gates underprices you, and if
you're cheaper then he uses Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
This guy... William Gates? He's my age. He's a gentleman
of my generation. We're a few months apart in age. I've
never met him. I hate to pick on him. Really. He's
obviously a very smart man. And he's a nicer guy, as a
human being, than a lot of his competitors. But I have to
pick on Bill, instead of Bill's competitors. Because Bill
physically killed and ate all his competitors.

The older Bill gets, the uglier he gets. He's a guy
riding a white horse, that turned into a runaway bronco
bull, that turned into a scaly crocodile, and now, it is
turning into some kind of diseased revenant. It's like
the Steed of the Nazgul, those black, flying zombie horses
that explode when exposed to fresh water. That's what
Microsoft is like now. These guys, these Nazgul... They
used to be kings. They were originally human beings, they
had wives and children and futures, they had their own
little nations to govern and manage. But then there was
the One Ring == One Ring to Rule Them All. One. And they
couldn't resist. And they gave in.

It's not even about "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt" any
more. The flavor of it has changed. If you look at it,
it's all about Fear Uncertainty and *Hate.* "Where do you
want to go today == to give us some money, OR ELSE?"

And the answer == the popular American answer, really
a kind of consumer uprising here == is: "I wanna go steal
some MP3s!" That's the answer. "I wanna go pirate some
Hollywood movies and keep 'em for myself, please!" And
the reaction is: "Gee, our customers are criminals! They
must be spied upon, lest they hurt us, and one another!"

The result is 95% market domination by Microsoft. But
that's not a market economy. That's not even capitalism.
That is a state-capitalist, state-sanctioned monopoly that
Mussolini would have smiled on. Mussolini used to give
the people of Italy free radios. But they would only tune
in to the fascist station. This was supposed to be the
only kind of radio that people in Italy understood. This
was the entirety of Italian radio as a medium.
Mussolini's radio had just one big dial on the front that
said "Radio Zone."

The devices we're looking at now have that vibe to me.
The contemporary PC, this is like hostility and paranoia
made into a plastic consumer device. By Intel, and Dell.
And Bill == I don't sense that he's happy about this. The
man seems troubled. He has a guilty conscience. He's
vaccinating kids in Africa who don't have telephones,
while kids in the USA who have Pentium 4s are spewing his
viruses.

What the hell kind of industrial policy is that?
Teddy Roosevelt would jump down off Mount Rushmore and
kick our ass from hell to breakfast for tolerating such a
situation. It's the Palladium Security State. It's an
operating system that hates and fears you.

Microsoft Windows is slowly but surely becoming an
armed terrorspace. It's like an airport. You go into an
airport nowadays, it's really kind of amazing that the
people who run them still expect you to *spend money* in
there. They still pretend to you that you are this
pampered jet-set consumer, instead of a captive under
armed guard, which is what you are.

People in airports do horribly oppressive things to
you. They go through your shoes, they empty your pockets.
They confiscate various small but valuable items. "Where
Do You Want to Go Today?" That's what they say in the
airport, but there's this skeleton grin behind that
question. There are men in camou with automatic weapons.
There are surveillance cameras all over the place. You
can't bring in your wife, your girlfriend or your
grandmother without a ticket. You can't sob as you kiss
your mother goodbye for the last time at the airport,
because it's all on security tape. Then you wander into
this rigid, bloated terrorspace, where, during every move
and every action you undertake, it's presumed that you
have swallowed dynamite and will cheerfully kill anyone
you see.

And yes, that's also the contemporary computer system.
The computer industry is really screwed-up now. There are
razor-thin returns on investment, because you are no
longer allowed to invent anything or genuinely surprise
anybody. And if you do, that will be immediately swept up
into Microsoft's operating system, or even Apple's dinky
little operating system. The computer industry is losing
tons of money now.

All that boasting about the largest legal creation of
wealth in history... It's the largest semi-legal
destruction of wealth in history. It blows my mind that
these VC guys, who spent 20 years blathering about Ayn
Rand capitalism, don't just *admit* that they live and
work in a stagnant monopoly. What a bunch of limp-wristed
sissies these captains of industry turned out to be, all
these swaggering mercenaries so eager to punch out the
bureaucrats in the free market. They're a race of slaves!
They're like deer in the market's headlights, they creep
around like mice.

It reminds me a lot of METROPOLIS. That old silent
movie, with the robot that turns into a pretty girl? In
that film, METROPOLIS, they've got this sweet-tempered
liberal girl, who's trying to educate the workers'
children. But she gets kidnapped by the corrupt
oppressors from the top of the givernment. Then in comes
this deranged operating system that moves like a woman....
The difference between the denizens of METROPOLIS and the
movers and shakers in the computer industry is that the
degraded proletarians are willing to rebel, while the
Americans just moan and writhe in their sleep as their
stock options go underwater.

It amazes me that the grocery boys in Silicon Valley
don't just kick them unconscious and take their sports
cars.

The stark moral choices that underlie all this...
they just keep getting starker. There's nothing newly
created. Even free software guys, who like to spend a lot
of time talking about grand community-building schemes,
spend most of their working time aping commercial
products. That's what they do. "We've built something
that can interoperate with Microsoft!" That's like
sticking banderillas in a bull, when the world really
needs at this point is something like... a piping-hot
catfish dinner.

OPEN SOURCE CONFERENCE ORGANIZER: I'm sorry, sir -- we
have to move your room.

Bruce Sterling: You have to *move* my *room*?

ORGANIZER: Yeah. Sorry.

Bruce Sterling: Can't you just throw out half the
audience?

AUDIENCE: (laughs ominously)

ORGANIZER 2 (soothingly): It's just right next door,
though.

Bruce Sterling: It's "just right next door?"

ORGANIZER 2: Just right next door.

Bruce Sterling (to audience): Are you guys gonna rebel
at this?

Guy in Audience: Open up the walls!

ORGANIZER 2 (hastily): No, they can't open up the
walls. They're gonna move that one in here. That room
next door is bigger. More people will be able to sit
down. It'll be more comfortable for everybody.

Bruce Sterling: Maybe I should just wind this up.

AUDIENCE: NOOOOO!!

Bruce Sterling: You're really going to get up? Like
the waters of the Red Sea? Okay, let's see you do it.
I'm the last man out of the room.

(tape break)

Bruce Sterling: I know lunch is coming, we've got to
eat... But I'm still venting my ever-growing fury!

There's a noticeable lack of basic creativity in the
free software world, that is alarming and not very
flattering. People in free software still have a
basically piratical state of mind. They want goods
without working for them. They still have a cracker state
of mind. "How can I look through that closed bedroom
window?"

"GNU's Not Unix." Okay, you're "not Unix" == but what
are you really? Why do you have to live in that shadow?
The shadow of this other enterprise. There's something
basically juvenile about that. Something that is
unworthy, creatively feeble, childish.

But it's not as bad as the scene in commercial
software. There's no reason to buy Microsoft dot-Net
stuff that spies on you and installs digital rights
management gizmos against your will. Why buy into that?
Do you *want* to get sucker-punched? Do you *want* to
make Jack Valenti the king of your box and Mickey Mouse
his commissar?

Plus there's those virus horrors. And why people are
willing to do this to the people they love and trust best
in the world is beyond my understanding. If you had some
kind of sexually transmitted virus, and you woke up in the
morning dripping pus, I would hope that you would
understand that there was some kind of moral need for
immediate action. Even if it was kind of inconvenient and
humiliating and personally degrading.

But if you're running Microsoft Outlook and Outlook
Express, it somehow seems kind of okay to spew Klez-H,
Sircam, Klez-E, Magistr-B, Hydris-B, Magistr-A, BadTrans-
B, Vavidad.E1, Yaha-A and MyLife-J.

And you're not just infecting your girlfriend, boys.
You can hit your mom, your grandmother, your maiden aunt,
your ten-year-old daughter! "Gee, why didn't you teach
your ten year-old not to click on the attachments?"
Because she's ten years old, you moron!

I had a long argument about this with Cory Doctorow.
He and I were really going at this hammer-and-tongs, over
the growing spam and virus crisis. And I thought that
there needed to be some kind of political and legal
solution. Like building a galvanized steel cage in Cuba
and throwing all the spammers and virus writers in there
as unlawful combatants who are clear and present deadly
enemies of humanity.

AUDIENCE: YAAAY!!! (Applause)

Whereas Cory is a techie, and he wants a techie
solution. So he's a fan of stuff like Vipul's Razor, and
he doesn't mind if the traffic on the Internet is 96%
fraud, malware and evil garbage as long as none of it gets
on his feet.

So, I let Cory convince me and I installed Mozilla on
my Mac. And its bug-track completely wrecked System 9. So
I stopped fighting with Cory Doctorow. Not because he was
winning the argument, but because his fucking Open Source
solution cost me three days of desperate effort to restore
my files! So I took the further trouble to install System
X, and I backed up everything of course, but I still don't
get it about System X quite frankly, and neither does
System X. It never knows what it's running. There are
chunks of Microsoft code in there like giant lumps of
black putty just *lying* to you about what they are doing
on the Internet. It's like trying to wade through drilling
mud running this thing. It steers itself by committee.

And Microsoft Internet Explorer and AOL, they
desperately hide the realities of the Internet from you,
so that they can profit from your growing and ever more
permanent confusion.

As opposed to the sparkling lucidities of the free
software developers! Free software, basically congealed
by people who have some vague idea what they are doing,
and are loathe to spend any time writing down specs, when
they could be writing new features.

Another Guy in Audience: Preach it, brother!

"Don't like it? Hey, just reconfigure it yourself,
don't bother me!" It's the Hippie Squat Model of software
architecture. "If I want to paint the doors and floors
bright blue and put the toilet right into the kitchen, why
not?"

It's very offensive to user sensibilities and it is as
ugly as a sack full of penguin guts. But, you know, that
is a vital systemic advantage. Because that catches the
eye of the committed crusader. It actually brings people
in who will stay and work hard for no money.

It's like life in a refugee camp. If you want Doctors
Without Borders to show up, you *don't* want to have
yourself any kind of really *nice* refugee camp. With
some flowers, and a safe place for old ladies to knit.
You want that inferno of starvation and disease that looks
really good on CNN. Because if you actually *organized* a
refugee camp, then you'd have stuff like taxes and gas and
electricity and police protection, as opposed to what one
gets in squatters' camps, which is, incessant internal
quarrels. Because there's never just one gang trying to
run the anarchy. You get bitter quarrels, between Free
Software and Open Source, between the Stallman hero-model
and alternative business.

And, that's an interesting discussion. But,
nevertheless, it's an industrial model which is in
practically every sense much less attractive than the one
of the early 1980s, when there was a genuinely functional
computer industry with some actual competition in it and
room for real innovation.

But at least open source is clearly better than the
Microsoft stranglehold. Man, US Steel, General Motors and
Standard Oil at their worst and cruellest were better than
that.

What's the real price you pay for free software? The
real price you pay is having to bow the knee to the weird
organizational model and the freaky, geeky social values
that prop that up. If you're the user, you have to hang
out with Linux freaks.

Yet Another Guy in Audience: And buy us beer!

That is the price. You pay a price in attention and
respect, and hours and hours and hours of selfless
devotion. You keep feebly hoping that something will
actually work right out of the box, and maybe even look
nice. But then you get stuff like Gnome, KDE and Eazel...
They just don't like to do the boring stuff for the stupid
people! That's just not in the job description! It's not
even a job. That's the secret.

You know, information doesn't get to be free. But
that's got very little to do with the bits, or the atoms,
or the bandwidth, or the speed of the copying, or any of
these things that techies lick their chops over.
Information stays expensive because of the social
processes in which information is embedded.

Let me see if I can make this clear to you with a
whole series of nice little literary metaphors. We need
to personalize this problem, as a series of human stories
about human relationships.

First of all, let's just forget about stuff like
cyberspace and the speed of light and the weightless bits.
Given that there is a ferocious triple dominance of
Microsoft on operating systems, Intel in chips and Dell in
hardware, the computer industry is finally getting boring.
Almost as boring as my own business, the book business.
It's still pretending to innovate, but its glamour routine
has gotten all ritualized. The machines are slow, the
programs are bloated, the changes are cosmetic, just like
the heyday of Detroit's Big Three carmakers, so many years
ago.

The computer business wants to be really hot and sexy.
It's like eavesdropping on a rich kid's affair with a
supermodel. He's the user, he's the customer. He's
eager, he's gullible. But she'd better be taut, hot, and
totally glittering, or he'll pitch her right off the edge
of the loading dock.

She's the vendor. She's this lean, mean, beanpole-
tall jet-setter who's always heaving iron in her gym or
preening before the cameras, screaming hysterically for
next season's fashions. And as long as both of them don't
know what's coming next -- as long as they can't outguess
that, as long as they just plain don't know -- then
they'll be as glamorous as all get-out. Just as long as
their bubble of mutual infatuation has yet to burst.

Because in the information economy, everything
important that happens is about the relationship. The
information economy is about who promises what to whom.
Behind the scenes, it's all about commitment.

The point is to make it harder to break up with me,
the vendor, than it is to put up with my continual
exploitation. There are basically six ways to do this.
They get used in the information business all the time.

Number One. A contract. We'll put it on paper. We'll
make it a legal, binding relationship. We somehow agreed
that we really need each other in order to go on living.
We stood in front of witnesses and we agreed to stick it
out no matter what. That's normal, it's honest, it works.
Unless it doesn't work, in which case it gets really nasty
and leaves permanent scars.

Number Two. Brand-Specific Training. I'm really
complicated and hard to figure out, but I give you
something you just can't seem to get elsewhere. We spent
endless days and nights talking over all my painful
personal quirks and kinks, and getting all wrapped up in
me and my needs. Now that you finally understand me, it
just seems exhausting to throw me over and try to date
somebody new.

Number Three. Search Costs. There's probably
somebody else who would suit you as well as I do, but
you're never going to find them == not in a sorry little
town like this, anyway.

Number Four. Information Formats. Nobody else can
even speak our language around here. We've got a private
argot of voodoo keyboard rituals. It's like a private
lovers' baby-talk. If you try to ditch me and pick up
somebody else talking that way, she'll look at you as if
you came from Mars.

Number Five. Durable Purchases. You bought a huge
mainframe and special scanners and printers, and a car and
a fridge and a house. You can't just walk away from all
that. Boy, can I ever make that cost you.

Number Six. Loyalty programs. I seem to like you
better every time we go out together. I come up with all
kinds of sweet little favors based on how well we're
getting to know each other. Your Mom and Dad will love
me. So will your friends and family. Look how thoughtful
and generous I am with the people who can commit. Let's
all get real, real cozy.

There are some other interesting aspects of this
informational romance. They may not seem real technical
== you may not find them built into the hardware == but
these gambits all get people to pay big, expensive wads of
money for information that wants to be free.

A. Branding and Reputation. Listen, baby: you can
trust me. I've got breeding: my famous family of products
has been around for generations. I'm just not that kind
of guy! Why would I risk all that just to take advantage
of you in this one little situation? Stick with the gold
standard == me and mine == and save yourself a lot of
heartbreak.

B. Standards-Setting. Everybody depends on me. I
shoulder the grave responsibility of being reliable and
predictable. I am the authoritative source through which
all good things flow. The government smiles on me. So do
international committees. If it doesn't work with my
stuff, it just plain doesn't work.

C. Expectations Management. Also known as "Fear
Uncertainty and Doubt." I know you're thinking of buying
from that other vendor. But his stuff is hazardous and
will injure you. Besides, I'm making one of those myself,
just next quarter. Mine will be much better than his, and
more people will use it, so you'll just have to buy it
from me anyway, and plus, everybody will laugh at you.
You'll lose your job. Look at the way I stepped on my
competitors. I could step on you, too.

D. Creeping Featuritis. I'll add more and more
"attractive" features to keep my jaded user intrigued.
You like eye shadow? Lip gloss? Tattoos? Piercings?
How about some latex and black rubber? Would a clown wig
help?

E. Sell the Organization, Not the Information. Let's
be very clear about this. I'm not selling you ones and
zeros. You are hiring me as your grand vizier, because I
have a deep cybernetic insight that is denied to lesser
beings. I'm an indispensable part of your management
team. Just give me your wallet, I'll look after all that.

F. Dubbed Local Versions. It's too hard to get a date
in the English-language market, because they're all so
cynical and sophisticated! But I'll be wonderfully
glamorous if I take everything I learned and translate it
into Hindi, Chinese and Malay.

Quite a spread, isn't it? You wouldn't think
relationships could be so full of pitfalls!

And then == there's the Open Source Model.

That Linux Girl. That little slip of a hippie girl.

She's barely noticed at first. She lives in a little
trailer shack, and her address at MIT is 666 Infinite
Corridor. She's got this mad geek stare in her eyes.
She's got open arms, and a threadbare tank top, and
unbuttoned jeans. Free Love, that's what it's all about
for our Linux Girl. Free like freedom, free like beer,
free like, whatever.

She's playing old, sentimental, Linda Ronstadt
albums... "You and I travel to the beat of a different
drum"... Love, Peace, and Linux...

"I love geeky guys," says the Linux Girl. "All geeky
guys, I love ALL geeky guys. And I'm not ready to settle
down. EVER!! I don't do that AT ALL!! Washing your
socks, ironing your shirts, HA HA HA, let me offer a light
little hippie-girl laugh here! Just cruise on by the
trailer, handsome! I'll take my clothes off. No, it's
better than that. I'll take my RIBS off! You can see
RIGHT THROUGH ME! I've got nothing whatever to hide! I
am open all the way through!"

The A&R guys from the industry are dropping by... "We
may have a star here boys, I'm liking this Janis Joplin
thing... But wait a minute, Janis here doesn't do
anything *but* free concerts! And I guess her code looks
pretty tight and shapely, but her body is *completely
transparent*! You can't get anybody to *pay* to see a
woman sing when her *body is clearer than glass*! It
kinda defeats the whole purpose, really! It's like some
kind of totally *academic* thing she's got going on here!
She's like the Visible Woman! There's something *creepy*
and *medical* about her..."

Free Love as a policy is sort of okay. I mean, people
will kinda overlook it when you're young... Because they
expect you to *die,* of VD or AIDS or something! But the
Linux Girl just laughs at viruses. "HA HA HA! Only
debutantes from Redmond get viruses!"

And then she starts *having children.* *Any* guy's
children. She'll have *your* child, as long as you're not
particular about giving it your name. She's got a whole
*brood* of kids, like Sendmail, and Postfix, and Apache,
and Perl. And some of 'em die young, and some are
mentally retarded. But the hippie earth mother is just
hitting her stride here. She's a one-woman demographic
boom! She's having litters of kids, kids by the dozens.

Cops are coming around, and stuff... "Is this your
trailer park, ma'am?"

"Not really, officer!"

"Could we see some ID, please?"

"I never bother much with any official papers!"

"Are you from around here, ma'am? You don't look
very American."

"Actually, I'm Finnish, officer! Look at this old
birth certificate!"

"We'd better run her in for questioning.... Whoa! I
can't even get a grip on her! It's like pitchforking
mercury! It's like she's made outta mirror sites!"

And the guys from Redmond come by and roll down the
smoked glass in the back of the limo... "She's
DISGUSTING! She's a cancer on our community!"

Now the very earth is starting to crack where this
woman walks... She's as big around as a bus! She's got
children in places other business models can't go, places
they've never even heard of! She's got children like...
Red Flag Linux.

This Chinese kid, in a little Mao suit. "Thank you
for the free software, Mother! We will destroy the running
dogs of Wall Street now!"

"No problem, Red Flag, they're doin' it to themselves!
He's such a polite and disciplined little boy, my Red Flag
Linux!"

And then there's the Simputer. He speaks Telugu and
Hindi and Urdu, and he costs only two hundred bucks!

"I love you Mom! I am the future, Mom! Demographics
and birth rates are on my side, Mom! My new President is
an atomic rocket scientist Mom! Someday you will die,
Mom, and I take you to the Tower of Silence for a Parsi
funeral where the vultures will eat your flesh, and then
the future of computing will be mine as far as the human
eye can see!"

"HA HA HA, oh my Simputer boy, he's so imaginative!"

In conclusion: these are some pretty hard times.

In times of adversity, you learn who your friends
are. You guys need a lot of friends. You need friends in
all walks of life. Pretty soon, you are going to graduate
from the status of techie geeks to official dissidents.
This is your fate. People are wasting time on dissident
relics like Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky is a pretty
good dissident: he's persistent, he means what he says,
and he's certainly very courageous, but this is the 21st
century, and Stallman is a bigger deal. Lawrence Lessig
is a bigger deal.

Y'know, Lawrence, he likes to talk as if all is lost.
He thinks we ought to rise up against Disney like the
Serbians attacking Milosevic. He expects the population to
take to the streets. Fuck the streets. Take to the
routers. Take to the warchalk.

Lawrence needs to talk to real dissidents more. He
needs to talk to some East European people. When a
crackdown comes, that isn't the end of the story. That's
the *start* of a dissident's story. And this isn't about
fat-cat crooks in our Congress who are on the take from
the Mouse. This is about global civil society. It's
Globalution.

I like to think I'm one of your friends. That's easy
enough to say. But one of the true delights of the world
of free software is that it's about deeds, not words.
It's about words that become deeds when they're in the
box.

And boy, what kind of deeds are we seeing this
season! Cybersecurity, the terrorspace, information
warfare, pirate panic... and Mickey Mouse as an armed
enforcer with a Congressional license to stalk and whack
P2P networks, mafia-style? As Worldcom has lost more
money that the gross national product of Hungary? You're
gonna see who your friends are before this is over. You
have a lot more friends than you think.

Thanks!

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
FREE LIKE A PUPPY
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O





--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))